Social Reinforcement: Cascades, Entrapment and Tipping
American Economic Journals: Microeconomics, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 86-99, 2010
14 Pages Posted: 22 Oct 2011
There are 2 versions of this paper
Social Reinforcement: Cascades, Entrapment and Tipping
Social Reinforcement: Cascades, Entrapment and Tipping
Date Written: 2010
Abstract
The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as Harvey Leibensteins's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differences, and show that tipping of equilibria, cascading and clubs with entrapment are natural consequences of this mutual reinforcement. If there are several equilibria, one of which Pareto dominates, then the inefficient equilibria can be tipped to the efficient one, a result of interest in the context of coordination problems. We characterise the smallest tipping set.
JEL Classification: C72, D80, D85, Z13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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